I build characters as a hobby, and I found that the standard mercenary, do-anything-for-money motivation just doesn't click for some of them. I've been thinking of other motivations to drive Runners. I don't just mean that standard background question, "Why do you break the law?". I'm talking about people like the Ork terrorist (think IRA) who gets his funding from the disenfranchised Ork masses, or the former military man who lives off his military retirement (the modern Air Force gives full retirement after 20 years, so a human or an elf could be set at 40) who does things for personal reasons, not for profit (though he still collects his pay - ammo costs money, you know!)

Or maybe an independently wealthy vigilante, or a bored sim star out for a thrill (global fame + day job)

Anybody have more ideas in this vein?

Funny, I was just reading some of the PbP stuff and thinking that a lot of the time people put TO much time into thinking out the reasons and what not for a person to be a runner. I mean a lot of the time people don't have deep driving reasons for the stuff they do. No starving brother or sister they have to feed. No past wrong they have to a burning passion to redress. No particular goal, no real rhyme or reason to their life. Lots of people drift aimlessly about the see of life. This is true of a number of staple characters from Cyberpunk fiction.

So sometimes I think people backstories can come out over the top. Lots of times people just live the life they sort of fell into. No reason a shadowrunner can't come about that way either.

I just recently started being GM for a small group of friends, and none of them are mercenaries.
two of them have the SINner quality, and they have been fired from two different megacorps, therefore they no longer like them. the third player, a shaman with alergy polution, has lost her family due to the polution of the corps, together they have formed a team to get money and work together on bringing damage to at least parts of the corps:)

True, but I'm specifically looking for alternative money sources. It doesn't have to be a two-page single-spaced sob story; I just get tired of 'runners who see injustice and wonder how they can make money off of it.

One concept I've been thinking of for a campaign is reality show terrorists. Characters who perform acts of excessive public violence and then post sims of it onto the matrix for the sole purpose of achieving fame. The more public and grandiose the violence, the more popular they can expect their sims to be.

Why not have running be the family business? There have to be some 2nd and 3rd generation runners out there, maybe they do it because mom and dad expect them to follow in their footsteps?

A game we having been planning on running for ages is one where instead of runners the players are a doc-wagon high-risk medical team.

Anywho, characters need some reason to be running the shadows, even if it's just paying the bills with the only skills you have(though how you got those skills is another story entirely). One important things to remember about runners is that the hyper idealistic ones don't last long. All successful shadowrunners need to understand that sometimes they need to do things they don't like. Maybe they need the money and skills to help further their goal elsewhere, maybe they want to curry favor with someone, or maybe their team just accepted a run they don't like but they are going along anyways because hey, they are in a team.

I think the intro of the first chapter of the Runners Companion sums it up quite well, a runner is many things, not just a mercenary. To quote "Sometimes, we're heroes. Sometimes, we shot other people right in the face for money."

A male Shaman I wrote up is a little psychotic. He started life in the circus, growing up with gypsies and hedge witches, who taught him magic. He would have been quite content to remain in the circus performing and pulling scams. Unfortunately, his mentor spirit The Seductress sabotaged him by driving him into a maddened lust over a young innocent girl who came to the circus, and in a fit of passion and fear of his fickle mentor, he murdered the girl. His motivation for running is not actually running from the law, but from his own mentor spirit, and this adversarial relationship makes him stronger the further (he perceives to be) from his loathed mentor.

My current pen and paper campaign has the PCs work for the local mafia family.

Well, I do character creation as a hobby, too, and just had an interesting idea.

Created a former Mitsuhama computer security guy who experienced the crash 2.0, then had his awakening and was mistaken for a technomancer, since he was unconsciously casting thought detection all the time (I`m hearing those "voices"...). MCT experiemented on him until he was freed by a team of shadowrunners accidently running in one of MCT`s secret labs and recognizing him as a mage.
Since then he`s been working as a runner accepting only jobs against corporations and sometimes does some vendetta kinda stuff for his one by messing with MCT.

I guess revenge is quite a good motivation, especially because nearly everyone got f...ed once by a corporation.

There is no way Mitsuhama wouldn't have him assensed by one of their wagemages before doing anything else.

The group I play with seem to have a pretty common idea of what kind of motivation we have together. We're all some kind of social misfit, though less with the little rascals vibe and more of the "society collectively shuns us" kind. A great many of us are feeding addictions in order to cope with life, while others are on the run from friends/family/organizations.

Ya, they're not too deep, but still very fun to play. On the more comical side, one of my players was playing a rich teenage cheerleader who was running to prove herself to her runner boyfriend. I've heard of action movie stars running to feed their action addiction when doing staged stunts became too lame. I've seen gang leaders who join running team because they're the last of their gang and have nowhere else to go.

And you can always go with the tried and true "my mother/sister/wife is extremely sick and I need to pay the bills route". One I'm experimenting with right now is one of those hardcore villains who really wouldn't mind seeing the entire world burn.

You also may want to consider talking to your GM about including an antagonist to your character in the game as well. The current game I'm in has an antagonist to every PC, which gives some nice opportunities for development and answers pointed questions about your backstory. If it can be included without taking away from the fun of the other characters, it's really worthwhile.

We do it to increase our persona rating.

We may not be professionals, but no-one can deny we are not entertaining.

I really don't like the "he's running for fun" explanation, unless the character has major mental problems. I just can't see anyone right in his mind suddenly deciding to become a criminal, to kill people and to get shot at everyday just for fun. Especially when all this can be done in VR with much less trouble.

Finding a good idea to explain why the character is running the shadows isn't always easy. Here are a few I've used for my characters:
- Former company man (Matrix Specialist), lost his I.D during the Crash and was nearly killed by one of his rivals (aggressive competition there). He found a place to hide in the Barrens, trained to be able to defend himself and was able to master his magical abilties as an adept (he had never been able to do anything with them before) and started doing some dubious Matrix jobs to earn money. He finally got a new SIN (when the government handed a lot of them) but decided to keep working freelance, with mostly legal jobs but also some less legal jobs from time to time. He was starting to live a new life again when his girlfriend got killed. He then started to do some highly dangerous Matrix jobs, hoping to get his brain fried and when he got offers for some jobs involving physical work as well he accepted. So basically he became a Shadowrunner because he lost all his trust in the society, got completely cynical and slightly suicidal.

- Another one is an underground anarchist rockerboy who was judged too dangerous by some corporate executive. He barely survived the assassination attempt during one of his concert and was brought to the local mafia clinic. It's not very clear why he wasn't only patched up but also received a lot of combat implants there, but when he got out of the clinic he was a killing machine, and he had a huge debt. As he doesn't get a lot of money from his music, the only way he has to repay his debt (and get back at the corps at the same time) is to run the shadows.

- I also have a couple of SINless characters who grew up in some places without laws or even morals and where death is common. For them, running the Shadows is just the best job available, when it's not the only one.

Rolled all ones.

We had a tiny security company that did red teams. Sometimes even on sites owned by the client....

We had legit licenses for all sorts of crap. It's a lot easier to get AV rockets when you can call up ares and have them take a PO for delivery in 3 days.

Deal was we never ran against a client or former client (at least one who had paid up) and we were pretty selective in what jobs we took.

I really like this idea. Very cool and flavorful.

Or the MCT mage was rascist and wanted the poor trog to suffer the experiments.

My throwaway character motivation is that the PC is like Miyamoto Musashi and goes around constantly endangering his life in order to perfect his martial skill.

But some people really are that crazy. Google Ted Bundy for one good example. And on that note, just because you're crazy doesn't mean you can't function; I'm friends with no less than three clinical sociopaths. They behave because it's in their best interests to do so; they've chosen to be moral, not because they feel certain actions are "right" or "wrong" but based on logic: people like you better when you don't kill them.

For those who don't know, a sociopath is someone who lacks a sense of right and wrong. It's considerably more complicated than that, but that's the gist of it.

Besides, aren't the vast majority of Shadowrunners crazy in some way? I should think violent sociopaths would be common in the shadows.

I ran into this when thinking about the background for my rigger,Tick-Tock. I tried several "Why are you a runner?" and they all sounded like promos for action movies.

"They killed his family,burned his home, raped his sexy girlfriend. But when they kicked his dog they went too far!!!! He's back and demanding"Frantic Justice"!!!"

I ended up going with that he just broke. Years and years of being passed over for promotions and told "You are a valuable employee but you are just not the person we are looking for to fill this position." or " We appreciate that you had that cyber implanted at your own expense to qualify for the position, but we all ready have someone in mind." ect.

So he just didn't go to work one day. No flashy exit. No plans for vengeance. Just stepping out the door and pointing his nose towards the barrens.

I play him as a man looking for something he missed or maybe hasn't found yet. Someday maybe he'll find it...or maybe not. till then he runs the shadows because they are there...

Well, there are reasons why, as shown, but I was actually thinking about some rivalry between him (my char) and one guy from his department who payed the wagemage for seeing nothing. The reason behind: a girl (what else), common, men started wars because of girls, why not paying to let your competitioner disappear?!

I thought of this guy reappering as an enemy once a while and both of them still fighting for the love of the girl. The guy also influences MCT to set a bounty on my chars head.

(= using all this nice an fluffy new negative qualities )

Man that hits too close to home, maybe I should run the shadows....of course the biggest problem is finding that first job.......

"Falling Down", with Michael Douglas as the lead. Or "He was a Quiet Man", with Christian Slater. Though not as believable a movie, the talking goldfish was a hit for me.

Peter

It was kind of autobiographical in nature. When things in RL get pressing I often say"I should be running the shadows" to myself .

@peter: I loved "Falling Down" . I relate to Bill Foster more than is probably healthy.

w00t. Only problem is, I don't have the skills to run. I'm not a shooter, I'm not a talker, I'm not a driver, I'm not a hacker...

Though my GF says I'm too good of a liar. That might help.

...Always room for a good Face 'runner, right?



Good call on this one. I've run a game for a pair of Renraku Red and another for some players who wanted to be Tir Ghosts. The good-cop-in-the-wrong-part-of-town is always a good one, as is the security guard AGAINST runners. Turnabout is fair play, non, mon ami?



It doesn't always have to be mental problems. Anyone else familiar with the Sean Connery character in "Entrapment"? It's all about the challenge. I played in a game where the runners worked exclusively for suits who want to "test their own security"... going so far as to check up on the Johnson's (or client's) credentials just to make sure it's not a double-cross... back story on that was that they worked for competing corps, but as a cohesive unit (ie: wage slaves put together for a purpose a la carte... compliments of the Corp Court).

*****

Given the history, one might assume that early runners (in the 30's-50's) did it for the same reason people become criminals IRL... because it's the drek they landed in. Some Johnson or drekhead fixer probably noticed that the character had aptitude for something and slowly worked them into the mix. I use all kinds of backstories for my characters, but here are some examples:

Iceman - grew up in Redmond. Survived the gang wars in the 40's as a bit of a teenage anti-hero, got set up by the former Redmond PD, then disappeared into the shadows to reach Prime status around 58 or so.

Crystal - middle class college kid turned lower-upper class "escort"... whores make lots of friends, and what better 'retirement' for such a person than Face/Fixer? No one in her chosen field would ever take her seriously, and she'd be fingered immediately if a fellow student or professor turned up in the corp of her choice. Goodby Life, Hello Shadows.

Angel - <Classified>

Hammer - Down-to-Earth Troll type... grew up alongside Iceman, turning to the shadows right after the war as a means to survive. Started as a courier for various fixers.

Throttle - Femminus Machinus. Dad raised her on engines and robots. His untimely death gave her no more inheritance than the shop in Puyallup where she grew up... and a few dozen cars and drones (most of them legal). Between the race circuit and the shadows, she manages to survive.

Eric - Working for Fuchi was great... until it all fell apart. Wrote the book on "Becoming SINless". Retains many former corp contacts as well as a distinguished relationship with Captain Chaos (God rest his soul) and Frosty. High profile friends + disillusionment = Mr. Black.

"Jolly" Roger - Recipe for a Street Mage: Combine one portion of Bad Corp Reputation with two portions of Influential Secret Society and a dash of Common Sense... slowly stir in some opportunism and apathy, then simmer over the belly of the Dragon of your choice (in this case, Perianwyr... ref DotSW). Best served chilled.

Did I miss anyone?

I also ran the photojournalist Blackie Pilger. He learned his skills of breaking and entering through his chosen profession of taking confronting photos for corporate expose's. He unfortunately realised that solo breaking and entering wouldn't cut it (he learned this through some nasty torture), so he decided to run the shadows, so he could continue documenting underhanded corporate practices and have the support personnel and financial backing to do so.

I've been trying to figure out how to work an ex-journalist. Who bankrolls your guy?

I have the idea of a person being a former hospital worker, taking full education for surgery, with speciality in implants.
while working at the hospital for some megacorp he/she will start learning more of the dark corners of the corps. and he ends up a cyber doc for some years, and ends up shadowrunning. I think the megacorp finds him and ruins his shop but he gets away alive thanks to the team he is now with.

next to this he has more knowlegde of being a Johnson than most shadowrunners, since he is also very charismatic and therefore the corp have used him as a johnson for smaller groups and jobs.

the corp bought him the tailored pheromones bioware to make patients feel more at ease with him around.

dunno how good a character concept it is, though I think it a little more explaining of his skills and how he makes his money then just " I run the shadows, I hate corps, I get money"

I will disagree with you on that remark entirely. I say this because very sane people and some that are very smart love combat and all things that come with it. They don't mind being shot at, or the mortars rounds shot at them or the IED's during convoys. You might be surprised with how many people actually have no problem with killing another person. Once you've done it once the others get easier. Also once some ones experienced that sort of excitement for any period of time nothing else is as exciting I would think, and wish to continually feel it. I think the term used is "War Junkies".

Plus a job is a job is a job. Whether the job is using an ax on a tree or a person, well some see no difference.

I have a couple mage character concepts that'd be really fun (for me ) to play:

1) A Free Spirit (I have the build, but don't want to post it; it's long) that involves Natural Weapon, Realistic Form, and Energy Aura (Fire) with the Materialization ability to look like a normal person (Realistic Form), but his true form is an Avenging Angel like http://www.elfwood.com/art/c/h/chris73/angel.jpg.html or http://www.elfwood.com/art/l/o/logdavis/angel.jpg.html.

2) A Christian Theurge (I'd change the tradition slightly... Being a Christian I don't like how they're displayed in Street Magic. That one's too influenced by Catholocism, and I have a lot of evidence to defend my stance that Catholocism is Polytheistic, not Monotheistic, so it's not Christianity.

Anyways, He'd have a respectable Spellcasting, but no combat spells at all (maybe a mana based stun, but that's it), but heavy on the Health Spells. And Conjuration would be his main "weapon" of choice, summoning a Guardian or Fire spirit (looking like an Avenging Angel).

"Thou Shalt Not Kill, and I shall not. Yea, let Azriel, Tyriel, and Raphiel speak for God, and judge thee in their eyes."

And in his eyes, the Binding Materials are not Binding Materials, but offerings to appease God and allow the angels to accept his requests (failed Bindings means he needs to pray more fervently and attone for some sins that taint his soul).

EDIT: And the reason they'd be running the Shadows is because Man's law is too innefficient and slow; God's Law must be followed immediately, against all transgressors.

Right. Only thing is, I'm not much good at negotiations. I guess I'd make a better con man than a face.

Which makes me think of the movies "Confidence" and "Matchstick Men". In each of those movies, the main characters are asked (or bring up) why they became con men in the first place, rather than doing anything else with their social skills (lawyer, salesman, etc.) From what I recall, they simply said "Because I'm good at it". And that makes sense, I guess. There doesn't have to be anything other than that for motivation.

"Why do you run the shadows?"

"Because I'm good at it."

I also think of one of the characters in the TV series "Bones": Hodgins, the "particulates" guy. In the series, it is revealed that he's independently wealthy. He doesn't have to work, but he does. He works because he likes it... the thrill of solving the mystery. It could be the same with the shadows - which, I guess is the "It's fun" argument.

"Why do you run the shadows?"

"Because it's fun."

"I once saw a guy jump in a pile of glass shards and asked him the same question... 'Why?' His answer: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'"

If you want to step away from the cliche "I was wronged and things must be made right (every action movie from the 1980s)", "My family! Noooooooooo! (see Vader, Darth and Punisher, The)" or "My girlfriend was killed and stuffed in a refrigerator!" plot points you can take a look at real life and see what motivates a person to become a professional criminal.

Increasing rate of unemployment could be a major contributor for shadowrunning. Consider a situation where a qualified young graduate remains unemployed for a very long period after he completed his education. His family may have serious expectations of him and in order to satisfy them he may go to any extent and cross any limit for payment. High ambitions could also motivate someone to shadowrun if he wanted to enjoy all the comforts of life or achieve some semblance of high-society status. It could also be learned behavior: my daddy was a shadowrunner so I'm a shadowrunner. Or it could be simple rebellion: my daddy's a corporate exec and I hate him so I'm going to do the exact opposite with my life.

The "In Debt" negative quality just screams plot hook. It's cliche, but "My sister was sick and I went to a Vory loanshark in desperation" works pretty well. Or maybe the mob has something on you; maybe they (either a criminal org or the cops) took you out of prison to do a job for them, and you go back in if you don't work for them (a la the Invisible Man TV show).

One of my prize characters was Bai He (Bonus points if you can tell what his name means ).

He was a Buddhist Shaolin monk skilled in hand-to-hand fighting and I had his motivation set at repatriation of Buddhist artifacts. He accepted artifacts as payment for certain jobs in order to give them back to various monasteries

That is awesome

You don't see many religious/spiritual backgrounds which don't revolve around vengeance or jihad. Kudos.

Ty

I wanted something to flesh out my character's background as a hand-to-hand combat master. A Buddhist on jihad didnt seem to really fit

Unless you're Bruno from A Fish Called Wanda

I like the Cyborg from Ares-tech that's being field-tested...

A SURGED character that takes their newfound powers (Celerity, Satyr Legs, a couple others) to a parkour styled super-hero-esque vigilante-ism.

The Walker mode, 2 arms car with a reinforced weapon mount loaded with a Lone Star Water Cannon running around as a vigilante firefighter.

A five shaman with Binding/Summoning foci (in the form of rings) who go around tracking down Toxic Shaman and summoning/Invoking a Great Spirit with all the powers of their other elementals to capture the magus and destroy/clean the toxic spills (NAME THAT SHOW!!)(With your power combined, I AM ______ ________!).

Captain planet?

There is allot to be said for breaking archetypes, but turning them on their heads...that's fun!

Let me introduce you to a friend of mine: Big Blue

Now Blue was a 1st edition Troll who showed up in the third Shadowrun game we ever played back in early 1990. We started that game on a separate timeline scale: 2046, and in Sao Paolo Brazil (Amazonia nowadays), as a mercenary. Yep a Merc. So where does the wall break? He wasn't in it for the money, even as a Merc, even from the start.

He WAS a Mercenary in that he got paid to perform many of the actions he undertook, in that he marketed himself as a Merc and in that he worked with other self proclaimed Mercs as well as with self proclaimed "Runners". But money was never even a tertiary motivation for him. It might have fallen in around quintinary, but even then it was more an "I've got to eat" sort of thing than to get wealthy. I personally was very active at the time with Habitat for Humanity and in a self help center in SW Florida to get homeless people back off the street and back in to society, so maybe Blue was an extension of what I would have liked to have done.

In many ways Blue and his buddies were Robin Hood and his Merry Men. We sold our services to anyone targeting aggressively exploitative corps like Aztechnology or a local AA that was doing a good deal of "aggressive relocation", Hraes-Biologica.

Don't let anyone tell you that mercs have to act, well, mercenary.



Isshia

I've run a number of differing characters. My two favorite so far had very different backgrounds.

Eldor "Highborne" Sil'Tareth - Albino (silver eyes and hair version) Elven Mage with a serious elitism streak. Recruited by a GM-created magical firm due to his magical capabilities. Ran the shadows as a member of a elite team of magically capable characters. The character was allergic to pollution, so toted the sterilize spell like it was crack. He also firmly believed that he was a member of the "High-born elves" because of his skin and eye colors. Absolute epitome of the stereotypically haughty, arrogant elf. The team he ran with eventually became known as Omega, simply because they were the final step to resolving *any* issue. If nothing else worked, send in Omega and it was taken care of. GM had to retire that game because he couldn't throw big enough things at us to keep us challenged (without resorting to ultra-high force spirits or Dragons on a regular basis).

Al Phillips: Former member of Lonestar, removed from the force due to getting caught using excessive force (he beat up the wrong corp brat apparently). No one on the streets wanted to hire a former cop with a penchant for violence, and he eventually devolved into a petty criminal. Arrested later for armed robbery and served 18 months in jail. That time did him well, and he was able to land a job after his jailtime finally. Eventually became the right hand for a (former, then returned) Mafia Don who also did time (tax evasion charges suck like that). He's also a retired character, and now serves as the head of security for the successor to the Don's empire after his untimely demise in a localized Family war.

One of my characters has a type of spiritual background not related to those. Not exactly why she runs, but I will attempt to explain it.
She seeks the reason why creatures die. Not the cause of their death, or the motive of the killer, but why the spirit leaves the body when the body stops working (the body can be fixed, after all).

She runs the shadows because she lusts after knowledge - particularly magical & ancient lore. You can learn things in the shadows that would not surface anywhere else. And the pay is good.


Second character - he runs the shadows somewhat for the reasons above, but more to learn of possible weaknesses for the major superpowers in preparation for the Apocalypse - something he will have a major role in, & possibly instigate.


Third character - because she enjoys it. Hobbies include rape & torture. Assassination also pays better than turning in bounties (her legal profession). She is one fucked up bitch.


Fourth character - Part thrill-seeking, part job, part misc. Really cannot say for certain why he runs, but he does.

"The difference between a mercenary and a contractor is that a contractor won't shoot anyone for pay that he wouldn't shoot for free."

Using that definition hew as also a Contractor then, but it went beyond that as well. Blue and his bunch were...ahh...really aggressive hippies. Tree hugging, whale saving, rob from the rich and use the proceeds to help build up an infrastructure for the poor (never just give...it's the whole fish thing) all while capping the baddies and generally being "muito fresco" and playing Jazz music.

Isshia

"There is nothing on the trid in the evenings anyways."